Solitude/Community

"My solitude was an illusion. No poet, however young or disaffected, writes alone. It is a connected act. The words on the page, though they may appear free and improvised, are on hire. They are owned by a complicated and interwoven past of language, history, happenstance." Writes Eavan Boland in her book Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. The name of the particular essay is Turning Away. I have been thinking about this weird connection between writerly solitude and this feeling of being an integral part of a collective for the last few days too. On the one hand, I need my solitude. To write, to read, to unpack. Yes, I like to write in the middle of bumbling coffee-shops. Yet, I hate it when coffee-shops have loud and intrusive music. I hate it too when they put up music which I am especially drawn too. It is, as if, the music outside will prevent me from tapping into the music I nurture inside, and can only hope will be translated into words on the page. But at the same time I know this music inside me that I am writing about here, couldn't have been possible if I haven't really lived a collective life. It is what I inherited from this world, from human existence collectively lived and experienced. Then there are other things too. As I keep working on my manuscript, I can't really leave out the question of the collective, the history, the "interwoven past," as Boland terms it. Especially since I am working on re-interpretations of fairy-tales/folktales, I keep thinking of the communities. What kind of communities told these tales? How many versions were there? What were the versions that were excluded when these stories made the transition from the mouth to the page? What is the role of the folklorist here? So, there is no way I can think of my work, however insignificant it is, as being a product of my solitary creation. When I am writing, I am also continuously thinking of the ways in which I want my writing to re-interpret the existing stories. And re-interpretation itself cannot necessarily exist without interpretation. In that sense, I am adding my voice, my narratives, my specific modes of representing these stories into an already-existing archive. I am trying to insert myself and my voice into a community of people for whom these stories/tales have meant something.